The enormousness of “California,” as a territory and an ideology, is hard for any mind to contain. It’s beautiful. It’s complicated and divided and challenged. Among one of a thousand ways to define the Golden State: culinary juggernaut.

Our spectrum of influence — from chefs, farmers, impresarios and dreamers who reimagined restaurant cooking into something synced with the seasons and personal identity, to the capitalists who gave birth to fast food — has shaped and kept reshaping how Americans eat over the last century.

Los Angeles alone is boggling enough in its magnitudes for a critic to eat and think through. I’ve wandered a lot in my career, though. As the world emerged from the grip of COVID-19, a professional curiosity surfaced: What was happening in the rest of the state? What had remained and what was changing?

Inquisitiveness evolved into a fevered question: What restaurants altogether tell the richest, broadest story of dining in California right now?

The riddle can never be perfectly solved, and yet: This is a guide full of delicious answers.

A year of driving up and down the California coast — steering inland and back, watching winter mountains bloom green and then fade to brown again by late spring — unfolded in a blur of taquerias, tasting menus, strip malls, remote highways, tostadas, dumplings, nigiri, falafel, pho, kebabs … .

Moments crystallized. The triangles of buttery, corn-filled pasta that trumpeted high summer in a rustic dining room on a hilly corner of San Francisco’s Financial District. The new owner who revived a 91-year-old diner in downtown Sacramento with a burger she calls “Southern Daddy” and her calling-card sweet potato pie. The glamour-soaked San Diego dining room, all golds and greens and chiaroscuro lighting, that set a cinematic mood for an evening of modern Vietnamese cuisine.

Attempting a statewide survey stemmed organically from the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles project that The Times has published annually since 2013. I’ve written or co-written six of them now. “Best” is a word for headline catnip that I live with but don’t love. “Essential” has always been more of a guiding precept for me. I want readers — you — to know about places for their incredible food, but I trust these very human endeavors also speak to something larger about dining and life in Los Angeles.

Seven years in, L.A. feels like my home home. The San Francisco Chronicle employed me nearly 20 years ago; the Bay Area is a mainstay in my adult life. I’ve never been keen on the “L.A. versus S.F.” tribalism. Isn’t it kind of staggering that this wild state, slightly smaller than Morocco and currently the fourth-largest economy on the planet, has two uniquely different and world-class urban hubs?

And there’s so much more of California to see and taste.

Too much, in fact, to fit into the usual framework. Yes, this is a list of 101 restaurants that serve many kinds of foods at every price tier. (I did leave off the three most famous tentpoles in California fine dining: Chez Panisse, Spago and the French Laundry. You know them. Go if they call to you.) Many of the entries put forth “extra helpings” — corresponding pillars of excellence that also deserve recognition. It’s the whole blessed state. There’s a lot to recommend.

These travels have likewise spurred fresh, deeper guides to popular destinations such as San Francisco, San Diego and Palm Springs. More are coming.

No single person could filter through the infinite possibilities; gratitude goes to the many food-writing peers and some well-fed friends who gave me guidance at every major intersection.

I did not rank these restaurants. This isn’t about numerals or symbol ratings. It’s one glimpse into our cultures and diversities — into cuisines that uphold traditions, or disrupt with originality, or inhabit some fruitful middle ground. Any endeavor like this is an invitation to savor and to debate. I crisscrossed plenty of California. It still feels like a beginning.